Flipkart suffers two more senior-level exits

Senior-level exits continue at Flipkart even after the company went through a management rejig that saw former Tiger Global executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy being appointed as chief executive earlier this year.

A report in the Mint newspaper says that senior vice presidents of engineering Hari Vasudev and Ashish Agrawal resigned from the e-commerce firm this week.

Vasudev joined Flipkart in April 2015 from Yahoo! where he was the vice president of engineering. Prior to that, he served as director of engineering at Kodak Imaging Network.

Agrawal's stint at the e-commerce major lasted just eight months after joining the firm in June last year from Micromax Informatics where he was the chief technology and product officer. He also worked as CTO at US-based IoT enterprise platform Sirqul in 2014.

Flipkart, however, denied reports of the development. "The information in incorrect. Both Hari and Ashish are very much part of Flipkart," a spokesperson from the e-commerce firm said in response to an email query from TechCircle.

In the first week of this month, TechCircle reported on a number of Flipkart exits, both at its flagship marketplace and its subsidiary online fashion retailer Myntra. The list includes Myntra's supply chain head and senior vice president Rajul Jain, who was one of the co-founders of lifestyle e-tailer Yebhi.com; Sharad Agarwal, vice president and distinguished engineer at Flipkart who was heading data strategy; and Raghuram Talluri, vice president and head of customer experience at Myntra – all of whom left the company in December.

India's consumer Internet businesses, which quickly became multi-billion dollar companies, are facing growth pangs and are witnessing many top-level exits. Other unicorns such as Snapdeal and Ola are also struggling to retain senior talent.

Flipkart, the most valued Internet business in the country, has seen a series of exits in 2016. Besides CXO-level exits—Flipkart saw its chief product officer, chief financial officer, chief technology officer and chief business officer quit last year—the company has seen a strong churn in the second layer of leadership as well. There has also been a slew of exits at the senior vice president and vice president level.

According to Mint, this series of exits leaves the newly appointed CEO Krishnamurthy with just three top-level executives to run the show at the firm. The available senior management team consists of chief operating officer Nitin Seth, chief technology officer Ravi Garikipati, and engineering head Ravi Krishnaswamy, in addition to finance controller Rajnish Baweja. All other major leadership positions including product, finance, categories and legal at the company are now unoccupied, the report said.

The top level shuffle, which comes exactly a year after co-founder Binny Bansal was made CEO, signals that the company is still striving to set the house in order even as it fights a tough battle against Amazon in online retailing.